About Face: In Praise of Older Women

"The heads she once turned, 
Long gone.
She finds no takers, for yesterday's papers.
She leaves and takes the back door out."
--Dave Loggins, "Sunset Woman" 

Some time ago I wrote about a long ago encounter with the young Cheryl Tiegs;I had seen a photo of the more recent version of Ms. Tiegs, and it got me ruminating about what it must mean to women like her to become older and no longer capable of turning heads.

When I was about 17, I worked as a lifeguard at a swimming pool in Bethesda, and a woman who must have been in her late thirties, came down most mornings and she would sit in the sit near the Lifeguard stand and we would talk about life. This was the 1960’s and before women’s lib and before the sexual revolution of the 1970’s, and our town hewed to the conventional ideas about marital fidelity, pre marital sex, female desire, what a respectable and desirable life for a woman ought to be.  This lady was reading Simone DeBeuavoir’s The Second Sex.  She seemed endlessly amused by me, mostly by my very conventional views, and by how completely I had bought into the ideas a good suburban boy should buy into, if he wanted to get the stamp of approval from the local gentry so he could get into an Ivy League school and get the hell out of town.

She never told me what she thought directly. She just asked questions and laughed at my answers.  Do you think married women do not lust after younger men?  Do you think married men are always faithful to their wives?  Do you think the best thing that can happen to a woman is a good man?

I don’t know why she bothered talking to me. I could not have said anything of interest to her.

I made some progress in my opinions about life and women, so by the time I was in my mid twenties and living in New York City, I probably would not have disappointed her quite as much. And still, while there was no shortage of willing young ladies my own age, I found myself involved, more often than not,  with older women.

I did this for no conscious reason, but in retrospect, they shared certain characteristics. For one thing, they were more confident, and they were not nervous. They did not seem to think they had much to lose, where I was concerned. They were not expecting or even looking for any future with me. They were just enjoying the moment.  Often, they were forbidden fruit, or they simply had more money and social status than I was ever likely to have. And they could do one thing which women my age only rarely could do: They could make me laugh.

That’s why I loved that line in Roger Rabbitt , when Eddie asks Jessica Rabbitt, the knockout vamp who  married  Roger Rabbitt,  what she sees in Roger and she replies, in that wonderful, unhurried Kathleen Turner voice, “He makes me laugh.

So when I saw Downton Abbey and watched all those drawing room parties, I knew I would have been drawn not to any of the younger women in the room, but to Maggie Smith’s dowager, who always had the most interesting, subversive, penetrating and funny things to say.

So, yes, I see the problem for post menopausal women, whose bones are getting thin, whose cheekbones are resorbing, whose breasts are sagging, whose muscles are shrinking, whose vaginas may be drying out. 

On the other hand, there are likely some twenty something men out there who would be very grateful to learn at the knee of an amused, detached, knowing older woman..

Women in their 4^th, 5^th and 6^th decades could perform a vital societal function. No, they may not turn heads, but they need not take the back door out.

Stick around and ask those confused boys some pointed questions.  It might be, as they say, a win-win.